Gijs Kessler

Profiel

Gijs Kessler (1969) studied history at the Free University of Amsterdam (MA, 1994) and the European University Institute, Florence (PhD, 2001). Specialist in the social history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Gijs worked on short assignments for the IISH in Moscow during 1994 and 1995, and returned to the Institute in 2002 to lead two consecutive Dutch-Russian research projects in twentieth century Russian social and labour history. In 2010 he assumed the position of Senior Research Fellow at IISH.

From 2002 till 2016 Gijs was based in Moscow. Next to his work for the IISH he taught Russian social and economic history at the New Economic School in Moscow, and was one of the founders of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Studies in History, Economy and Society (2004-2014).

Selected publications

- Gijs Kessler, “Sources for Writing the History of Russia and the Soviet Union. National and Transnational Perspectives”, in Aad Blok et al. (eds), A Usable Collection. Essays in Honour of Jaap Kloosterman on Collecting Social History (Amsterdam, 2014), pp. 376-385.

- Gijs Kessler, “Migration and Family Systems in Russia and the Soviet Union, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries”, in Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur (eds), Proletarian and gendered mass migrations : a global perspective on continuities and discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st centuries, Studies in Global Social History, 12 (Leiden & Boston, 2013), pp. 133-150.

- Gijs Kessler, “Russian and Ukrainian Seasonal Laborers in the Grain Belt of New Russia and the North Caucasus in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries”, in Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer (eds), The encyclopedia of migration and minorities in Europe : from the seventeenth century to the present (Cambridge & New York, 2011), pp. 658-659.

- Sergey Afontsev, Gijs Kessler, Andrei Markevich, Victoria Tyazhel'nikova and Timur Valetov, "The Urban Household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900-2000. Patterns of Family Formation in a Turbulent Century", The History of the Family, 13(2) (2008), pp. 178-194.

- Gijs Kessler, "The 1932-1933 Crisis and Its Aftermath beyond the Epicenters of Famine: The Urals Region", in Halyna Hryn (ed), Hunger by design : the great Ukrainian famine and its Soviet context (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 117-129.